Mayor Gray released from custody

Washington Mayor Vincent Gray and six city council members arrested Monday on Capitol Hill were released early Tuesday morning after being taken into custody as they protested cuts to city funding made as part of President Barack Obama’s budget deal with House Republicans.

Arguing that the funding of several Washington, D.C., programs had become a pawn in federal negotiations, the officials and a few hundred others gathered outside the Hart Senate Office Building on Monday evening in protest.

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“We needed to make a statement,” Gray said after his release, The Associated Press reported.

Restrictions on the city that were agreed to as part of the budget deal were “completely unacceptable,” he said, and had driven him to protest. He hadn’t intended to be arrested, but is proud he was, saying the budget battle between Congress and the city has just begun, TBD reported.

District congressional Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat, said last week that “District residents are being treated as colonists of the Congress of the United States and we are absolutely outraged.” She added: “It’s time that the District of Columbia told the Congress to go straight to hell.”

The budget bill includes a measure that would block not only the use of federal funds but also D.C. city funds to pay for abortions for low-income women. It would also block the use of city money on needle exchange programs considered key to fighting the spread of HIV.

And it would introduce a school voucher program seen as a pet project of House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) but opposed by Gray and other city officials.

Officials in the heavily Democratic city see the House’s Republican majority as pushing against the city’s autonomy. “If this isn’t taxation without representation, I don’t know what is,” Gray said before being arrested, according to the AP.

Capitol Police said they arrested a total of 41 protesters for unlawful assembly because they were “blocking passage” on Constitution Avenue.

City Council chairman Kwame R. Brown, and council members Yvette Alexander, Sekou Biddle, Michael Brown, Muriel Browser and Tommy Wells were among those arrested.